All forms of banner advertising should be measured with the same yardstick.
That statement couldn’t be further from the truth, yet more often than not, this is how things are done.
Roadblocking is not a new term, it’s been around in the television space for sometime now and refers to an advertiser buying all of the ad placements within a given media space. In this instance, we’re referring to an advertiser who has purchased all the impressions / ad placements on the same page of a particular website during one specific time frame.
Roadblocking is good for things such as campaign launches and general brand awareness as it gets your message out to the masses since it takes over every advertising spot your audience might see as they visit that site/web page. Click through rates for these types of ads are generally found to be low because the impression levels are so high.
Generally speaking, a roadblock has a leaderboard and a skyscraper and a box or rectangle of some kind.
To calculate click through rate for banner ads, you divide your total clicks by your total impressions. So if you get 3 million impressions as part of your roadblock campaign and 100 people click through, your click through rate through rate percentage is 100 divide by 3 million.
Which is completely incorrect.
It should be 100 divided by 1 million.
Each time an ad is shown that counts as an impression. If your ad is showing at the same time as another one of your ads in a different size on the same page, that’s also an impression for that ad – which now gives you two total impressions, for one person or set of eyeballs. And if someone were to click through on one of those two ads, that should be a 100 per cent click through rate.
Why?
Because it’s physically impossible for someone to click on both ads if served at the same time, yet standard click through rate measurements don’t take this into account.
As you evaluate your next online ad campaign, consider these two things:
1. Did you run any roadblocks?
2. Do you know if your ads ever appeared together on the same page at the same time?
If you answered yes to either of these scenarios, then you’re actually calculating your click through rate based on a physical impossibility and it’s time to see how these banner ads are really doing. You might just be surprised by what you learn.
Photo Credit: iboy_Daniel; Flickr
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available